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Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work
Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California
In her transmedia project, Designing Culture, Anne Balsamo investigates the way in which culture influences the process of technological innovation. Drawing on her experiences working as part of collaborative research-design teams that combine art/science/design/engineering, she will describe her new research on public interactives and the infrastructures of public intimacy. Anne Balsamo’s work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology. This focus informs her practice as a scholar, researcher, new media designer and entrepreneur. She is currently a Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. From 2004-2007, she served as the Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. http://designingculture.org
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William Uricchio introduces Anne w/her short bio. She’s a thought leader in tech and gender, worked at Xerox PARC, has a new transmedia project / book out called Designing Culture. She’s author of (cyborg women book from Duke U Press)
Anne Balsamo thanks everyone for coming so close to the holidays. She’ll give us a tour of designing culture (http://designingculture.org ) and talk about some of the projects she’s been involved in over the last decade, and end with some new work. Designing Culture began in 97-98. It involved not only a print based book, but also digital media making, which at the time she was calling public humanities work – today people talk about this as ‘applied humanities.’ For her, all forms were used to explore a shared set of research projects. “transmedia project” means it’s a book, DVD, website, interactive maps, videos, and a blog that archives materials.
The book was written alongside these other technocultural projects, and has several chapters, starting with Taking Culture Seriously in the Age of Innovation. Balsamo sees this as a manifesto of sorts: we need to put culture front and center in the innovation process. This comes out of the work she did at Xerox PARC and also her own work on collaborative design. In the book’s semifinal chapter, on Designing Learning, she explores the role of the University, and in the last section she examines the cultural work of the Book in the digital age. The broad premise is a set of provocations about the relationship between culture and innovation. It begins by tracking cultural markers and signs of thought about innovation, and lays out an argument for how our thinking about innovation needs to change:
“The wellspring of innovation is the Technological Imagination.” For Balsamo, this imagination is performative and improvises within constraints to create something new. There’s intentional resonance w/C. Wright Mills’ technological imagination. It pulls from her earlier book on the cultural implications of emergent biotech, which Balsamo has been interested in since she was a grad student in the 1980s. At the time she looked at female body building, in vitro fertilization, and other gendered tech as it emerged from the lab into popular culture. She used online ethnographic investigation, lurked in vritual spaces, watched researchers engaged in distributed, collaborative work, all as pop culture started to celebrate virtual reality. This work became Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. It explores how tech work gets narrativized and won over to specific scientific projects. She explored tech that had not yet been fixed in implications. Next Balsamo wrote ‘feminism for the incurably informed,’ as a way to look at multiple projects that feminists specifically and cultural scholars more broadly needed to pay attention to. It was an exploration in how one genders the technological imagination. Through the excercise of the technological imagination, people engage the material world to create the future of technologies.
Women of the World Talk Back
Balsamo then worked on an interactive documentary to celebrate the 4th world conference on women, UN conference that took place in Beijing in 1999. She felt the need to answer students’ questions about how her criticism could inform their design practices. This project, ‘Women of the World Talk Back,’ was an attempt to examine how cultural criticism could inform, shape, or animate new cycles of design and technological development. It involved taking a delegation of female students from Georgia Tech, registering as an NGO for lobbying privileges, lobbying around the education of women in science and technology (before STEM was on all the official agendas), creating recruitment materials for Georgia Tech to encourage more women to apply. They created a call and response interactive ritual called “women of the world talk back.” While at the Forum, they gathered footage, interviewed people, focused on women, tech, and media, then returned and rethought the materials in the form of an interactive documentary.
[links?]During this time, the web exploded. The material they had was very video heavy, and this was a problem in the early days of the web. So this interactive documentary had never circulated, although it’s now available as a DVD in the back of the book. Technological innovation is historically specific and can change in a heartbeat.
Balsamo took the lessons from this time period and used them to structure the stories in the book. First, innovation is not an object: it’s a process, it’s a performance, and innovations are historically specific. She also focuses on the elaboration of a reproductive theory of technology. It’s deeply informed by Haraway, feminist philosophy of science, and hopes to set the ground for further interaction between feminist scolarship and technological innovation. The notion of the reproductive logic of technology still had to be grounded in agency: who are the agents of innovation? What role do people play in the reproduction of new technologies? These questions led Balsamo to focus on designers, especially those who play a role in the nascent stage of new technologies. Designing is structured by culture, and also structures the reproduction of culture. Designing is inherently multidisciplinary, is based in social manifestations, makes the materiality of the world meaningful, and provides opportunities to do things differently.
Xerox PARC
This work brought her to Xerox PARC. She met up with Rich Gold, research scientist at Xerox PARC, and discussed art, science, design, and engineering as the 4 creative disciplines. They focused on where to place ‘the humanists,’ Rich Gold came up blank. Eventually he invited her to come spend time at PARC in the ‘research in experimental documents’ group (Group RED). Everyone there was emmployed as a research scientist: lighting designers, game designers, musicians, architects, engineers, sound designers, Media Lab grads, videographers, and so on. Balsamo joined the group as a ‘technohumanist’ (the term ‘digital humanist’ wasn’t around yet). There was no category of ‘humanist’ at PARC, but they thought it was OK to hire her since she was a ‘humanitarian.’ There were actually linguists, anthropologists, ethnographers, but the research center as a whole didn’t have the ‘humanist’ category; so Balsamo’s role was partly to reflect on and define the role of the humanist in technological innovation. One of their challenges was to create a display for an exhibition in San Diego: experiments in the future of reading. Her team decides to re-narrativize the research, thinking through the future of reading 10 to 20 years out. They created 13 new reading devices, each one based on some project taking place at PARC, but none of which had been conceived as a reading device.
Through this experience, Balsamo was convinced that she wanted to work in interdisciplinary teams, that she wanted to continue to work on tech innovation. Then came the dot com bust; 60 people were laid off – including her research group. Although some were offered the chance to remain, they all left in solidarity. 4 of them created a startup to generate cultural technologies (Onomy Labs: http://onomy.com )
The Institute for Multimedia Literacy
Balsamos continued to examine reading and writing as reproductive modes. She also became increasingly interested in the technological infrastructure of cultural reproduction. Another interest was in how to teach design thinking, design practices, and the shift to culture where everybody has the capacity to design, how to teach design skills? So with this goal, Balsamo moved to USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy (http://iml.usc.edu). She became a faculty in the Interactive Media Division (IMD), and more recently joined the Innovation Lab at Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism. At the time, Interactive was divided into Games, and everything else – she fell in the ‘everything else.’ One of the issues of working at IMD is that it has much less resources than the Cinema School; moving her lab to the Innovation Lab came with increased funding and support for her work. Working in this context at USC encouraged her to think more broadly about the role of the humanities in technocultural innovation.
The ‘manifesto’ of this aspect of her work is laid out in a diagram “how digital humanities contribute to cultural innovation.” It’s a model for Digital Humanities that connects new research questions, transformative applied research, tech prototyping, publications and outreach, tech of literacy, learner centered pedagogy, and more. She emphasizes different projects that focus on new models of knowledge production, including HASTAC ( http://hastac.org ).
Balsamo then shows examples of video works, including ‘reading eye dog’ (http://www.onomy.com/redweb/reading_eye_dog.html ), the Reading Wall (http://www.onomy.com/redweb/readingwall.html ).
The next project she shows is based on a set of questions from McLuhan: what does the technology amplify? What does the tech Obsolesce? What does the tech reverse into? And what does the tech Retrieve that was previously obsolesced? It’s a tool for students to use in analyzing new technologies, a provocation, a structure for reading technological devices: http://www.designingculture.org/release-0711/flashroot.html . The genre of the sliding reading wall was continued for the science museum in Singapore. It’s a new media genre that Balsamo is the only author of: interactive walls / sliding wall books. She’s also worked with interactive maps and video primers. There is a short project called ‘How a Robot Got Its Groove,’ that focuses on the performance of gender by Asimo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbgSXzyPWdQ&feature=related ). Designingculture.org therefore serves as an archive for the work from PARC.
Public Interactives
During the last part of the talk, Balsamo wants to focus on new research directions: public interactives. Public interactives are significant cultural technologies that are influencing the cultures of the future (?) This work is linked to the urban screen genre of research, to public large scale projections, interactive light works, responsive walkways (for example, ElectroLand), interative sculpture, relational architecture (lozano-hemmer, for example). Interactive architecture is currently focused on sensornets and information gathering, but at some point that focus will change. We will not simply inhabit architecture spaces, we will begin to have relationships with them, mediated by our ability to interact with them. This is also showing up in interactive advertising, walk-up games (for example, as shown in the Shanghai Expo). Very casual games that allow a smartphone to serve as tool for gameplay with strangers. Architectural Cinema, in the 360 degree mode. The example is the Saudia Arabia Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo ( http://en.expo2010.cn/c/en_gj_tpl_35.htm ). A popularized and spectacularized immersive experiece.
Finally, Balsamo’s new focus is on the Infrastructures of Public Intimacy. As public space transforms and engages people in dialogue, how do we bridge the scale of the human body to the scale of the building? One of the chapters of the book is public interactives; it traces the geneaology of this kind of project back to (Charles and Ray Eames) who initiate museum interactive design / kiosk design. The Onomy ‘Tilty Table,’ which allows the user to interact with large images, for example a large image of the AIDS quilt; this version of the display table is called ‘Quilty.’ This work is now funded by NEH ( https://securegrants.neh.gov/PublicQuery/main.aspx?f=1&gn=HD-51276-11 ), and they are working with the Names Foundation to implement it. There are 6,000 images of panels of 8, and they want users to be able to navigate through the entire quilt, from birds’ eye view down to individual panel. This involves integrating two databases: the metadata about each panel, and the images themselves, which up until now have not been integrated. The initial grant will fund a prototype, to go to DC in June, when part of the quilt will be on display as part of the Smithsonian (folklife) festival; they will then seek additional funding to implement the full project. The Names Foundation also has 58 file drawers full of ephemeral that have not yet been digitized. They are hoping to create a protocol and equipment for a distributed digitization project, to share the work of digitizing these materials across many locations. It’s an effort to do a large interactive memorial that doesn’t have monetary value, but has great cultural value. Another possibility would be to apply this kind of logic to other memorials, for example a Gulf War Memorial.
Final thoughts
Balsamo ends with an overview of several research questions that continue to animate her work, including ‘what are contemporary media forms, and how can we research them, and what does cultural theory contribute?
Q&A
William: Obsolescence came up several times. These are exciting projects, but we end up in a double bind: they don’t make it out there into the world, or the storage forms have a short shelf life. How can we reconcile the heavy investment in new forms of digital culture, even as they are fragile?
Balsamo: We’re back to books. The print book remains enduring, and there are key players who are invested in digitizing books and bringing them to new formats. I wrote the book because in 18 months, this weill be all that’s left of all of this work. That’s OK, because these were research prototypes or thought experiments. But it does raise the issue of ‘why do the digital stuff?’ It’s because that’s how our imaginations get exercised. That’s how the imagination moves, takes shape, explores new possibilities. These digital works make new thoughts possible, new questions and provocations. That’s the throughput that’s important for culture. The newly opened computer museum in Silicon Valley is an example: late in the day, somebody realized they needed to archive software. Initially they were focused only on technology as an object. Some of these will be archived, as Library of Congress starts archiving more scholarship. We need ways to archive these processes and the thinking that comes out around them, even where the works are ephemeral. Museums don’t archive these works. I have a wiki trying to archive ephemeral digital works. We get it upside down and think that the digital is permanent. This also makes us think about curating culture; what gets collected, what gets forgotten. Women over time have understood that the histories that matter to them are not the ones that get brought forward.
Ian Condry: Cultural theory and the design of technocultural experiences – you started with cultural theory, how is it best applied to rethinking what innovation might be?
Balsamo: the book is about that. How cultural theory can contribute gets answered in practice. It gets explored, with what gets designed. I document the design process, and focus on the conversations that were informed by cultural theory. So for example our thoughts about the history of literacy inform the 16 reading devices we decided to build. That question gets answered in a specific kind of way. As a general method, I do what I call cultural reverse engineering. Good designers do this as well: understand how to build something new, you reverse engineer other similar objects. I want to push this process back further than the thing itself. How does the thing come to be, what logics does it contain? It’s a necessary tech, or expensive, or enabling, and so on. Those narratives get set up before the tech is even engineered. Cultural theorists have other ways of getting at the meaning of the objects.
Ian: I’m a cultural anthropologist. We’re talking about fieldwork and ethnography, it seems a little different than what you’re driving at.
Balsamo: I come out of a Birmingham approach; also interpretive sociology, grounded theory. Culture as webs of significance that people live within. I’m interested in bringing this into the reverse engineering process. What are the webs of significance in which objects are embedded?
Q: You presented some wonderful lacunae in the absence of the humanist, but art was there. I see this in architecture and planning as well. Where are the fracture points? When I work with actual artists, where did you find that you hit the wall and you felt like a cultural theorist?
Balsamo: Experience. They didn’t understand my focus on embodied experience. Engineers thought I was going to do cultural evaluation, and that it was only going to be negative. Getting over that this wasn’t going to be a grade sheet about their work. Miscommunication about cultural criticism and cultural theory. I wanted to say that these conversations could be a resource. My asking ‘naive’ questions about the underlying science might get us to think differently.
Jim Paradis: I’m intrigued by the idea of the future of reading. Are you talking about changing media? What are some of the major trends that you see, and in what ways do those changes inform your work?
Balsamo: I’m trying to get one of my grad students to videotape people reading different kinds of media. When you’re confronted with a digital document, what are the many ways you can engage with it? In a digital age, how does reading manifest differently than the reading of a tactile device with the hand? I’m actually really concerned about reading literacies. Less so about authoring literacies. Many people are writing, but a lot of people aren’t reading. These new exquisitely produced documents are incomprehensible to the smartest people I know. I sit down with a highly designed interactive project and I have a hard time trying to get the intellectual nuggets, separate from the scholarship. What am I getting, and is it what I’m supposed to be getting? Reflecting on my own reading practices, I run up against a real illiteracy. I don’t know how to read some of the new forms. It’s also generational. I look at a WoW dashboard and don’t have the literacy to know what’s going on. I’m not part of that community, and so on. So I’m interested in how people learn how to read throughout their lives, over and over again. You don’t just learn once in grade school. My attention is drawn by how we learn to read new forms?
SCC: design for the rest of us?
Balsamo: that’s the next project. Tinkering in a digital age. The next project is ‘ways of the hand: tinkering as a mode of knowledge production.’ Innovation from the ground up. In 2009, I did documentation of Maker Faire; includes short interviews w/Maker Faire; the cultures of hackerspaces. The book project will be multimodal, with videos, interactive maps. It will also include work on tinkering and hacking in international contexts. I’m looking at tinkering as a way of life, in work in China. Tinkering not as leisure time, but as a way of life. Cara Wallis and I are looking at tinkering in the Chinese context. Tinkering and reverse engineering as a mode by which consumer eletronics are reproduced for black markets, other markets. So there’s a whole approach to that.
Fox: You talked about culture, designing culture. Talk a little about designing with hegemonic culture or subaltern cultures; you mentioned hypertext, design with Australian indigenous peoples, large international or local subcultures.
Balsamo: I want to argue that design is inherently interdisciplinary. If we look at hacker cultures or pop up shops in China, those aren’t interdisciplinary – they’re often solo efforts. It’s a different inflection. I don’t have those insights yet, but that’s what we’re pushing on. The different logics of hackerspaces in terms of community formation: how closed or open the space is. People might not be ‘credentialed’ as designers, but they can participate in the spaces. So we’re creating a set of analytics like open and closed, scripted and freeform. Those insights I had about design were contextually specific. There’s a continuum: open to closed. In the Xerox PARC situation, who could participate was a very closed community. They didn’t even do user centric design; the design was the brainchild of a special group of people. Those who do UCD is a little more open; those who do design in an urban space or pop up shop have an individualist sense of design.
Q: My question follows up Jim’s question about the future of learning. You’ve talked about the need for people to read different genres, different forms. I woner if it’s also about redefining what authoring is. You said you’re concerned there are more writers than readers. Do we have to renegotiate those categories entirely?
Balsamo: The categories of reader and writer are infrastructural, and historical. Something that you said connected with my interest in the intermediaries who are now going to stand between writers and readers, or media that relationship. Our previous infrastructural subject would have been an editor. In science, a peer review panel. Those subjects, the editor function is shfiting to a more curatorial function. I see an increasing role for a curator, who does things like curate on a blog all the interesting things that can be found on a particular topic. Curators take different forms of inflections: public opinion makers, political shapers, trendwatchers and culture watchers. Then there’s the media archaeologists or web archaeologists who are out there, keeping track, archiving, digging things. There are information visualizers who are mediating, in an interesting way, between readers and writers. If I’m confronted with an interesting informatic, they’re often much easier to read than some of these interactive works. A lot of work has been done for me, as a reader, by the visualization designer. There’s a range of intermediaries working between writers and readers. Twitter becomes an intermediary where I can now see people to follow, and just get their channel. There are many ways of writing; writing is changing; intermediaries are changing.
Q: Following up on that, to tie back to your work on gender – there’s a recent book on women’s literacies from 1600 to 1900. The question is what would have happened if women’s role had been acknoeledged. All these intermediaries are a certain subset of the population, but that’s not being made visible. Also there are teachers. Women taught children that which didn’t need to be taught in a public institutional way. That knowledge has been obliterated from the official histories. Here we are at a pivotal place. Is anyone doing that work to think about the gendering of the intermediaries? Are we reproducing that mistake?
Balsamo: No one is doing that work, and we are replicating the mistakes of 200 years ago. I was just at a conference, Judy Wajcman, here were all of these women who had the guts to take technology seriously as a feminist topic. Some of us do design work, some have been in industry, we were not even a loosely coupled network – we knew each others’ names, but that’s about it. I’m in Cinema, Judy teaches social policy at LSE; we all have some affiliation with a womens’ studies programs but those are all very beleagured programs. There’s a feminist physicist running a womens’ studies program, nobody knows her work. Under that banner, are we watching for the gendered and racial distribution of who is serving as our intermediaries. I don’t think that anybody is doing that.
Uricchio: We talked about the gap between sciences and humanities. Gender gap is another important one. Hard sciences are interested in changing gender inequality; what is that about? Is it a literacy issue, a representation issue, a skillset issue? There are many ways to think about this. Games want to bring in women, but AAA are driven by men. We learned that TV programming is driven by twitter, increasingly, but mostly it’s 18-34 year old men who are tweeting. Where are links, or causalities?
Balsamo: The situation is different in different places. In India, equal numbers of men and women go into engineering. After the degrees they move into a different cultural situation. In North America it’s about literacies. This was Haraway’s issue: feminists can’t cede technology because it has masculinist values. If women were saying ‘everything comes from DoD, I don’t want anything to do with it.’ Haraway said: no, women have to get engaged as makers, thinkers, designers, critics. I wrote a peice about my time at Georgia Tech about feminism in the belly of the beast. Their project was to keep women in engineering; all we could get was a minor in gender. It was the right response in that context: to teach gender studies to women who were going to go on to engineering, science, and so on. The history of science has erased women’s contributions, but we have to encourage people to go into these fields. The fields won’t change because of some biological difference. Women bring double or triple consciousness at times, not because being a woman makes them any more intuitive or skeptical or anything else: they’ve been socialized differently. For the NSF, it’s a workforce issue: we don’t have enough people trained to keep our science on track. If you’ve saturated the population of young males, then you have to start looking at young women. We grow with females and international students.
Q: We have not tapped enough under-represented males and we know it, although we have brought in enough white males.
END